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A CurtainUp 
London Review
London ReviewPrivate Lives
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"That was the trouble with Elyot and me, we were like two violent acids bubbling about in a nasty little matrimonial bottle."
— Amanda
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Anna Chancellor as Amanda and Toby Stephens as Elyot
(Photo: Johan Persson) |
This production has come from Chichester where Toby Stephens began his career in the theatre in his teens as a stage hand. Stephens' famously real life arguing parents, Dame Maggie Smith and Sir Robert Stephens once played Elyot and Amanda. In this production, Elyot's new wife, the weepily manipulative Sybil, allowing that wonderful line, "Don't quibble, Sybil!" is played by Stephens' real life wife Anna-Louise Plowman. Anthony Chase, with his hair Brylcreemed down, plays the stuff-shirt Victor Prynne. The first act takes place outside the French hotel and the second and third acts in designer Anthony Ward's opulent Parisian apartment for Amanda with its walls hanging with cubist paintings by Georges Braque and decorated with brass relief frieze panels.
The third act of the play depends on the entrance of the misled partners, abandoned on their honeymoon. It's less dramatically thrilling but gives a calmer conclusion as Amanda and Elyot decide what to do next.
Toby Stephens and Anna Chancellor are very impressive as the couple who cannot live without each other nor can they live without fighting —first arguing, zapping each other with one liners and then descending into alcohol fuelled physical attacks on each other which have the power to shock the audience.
The first act is probably the best version I have seen of this oft produced play. But if the alternative spouses are so repulsive, the audience will want Elyot and Amanda reconciled. Elyot and Amanda come from the leisured, moneyed classes where any work is a variant of play. Elyot has been on a world tour since he parted from Amanda for the first time and we are given the picture of him sitting on his own outside the Taj Mahal, that usual photographic cliché of a romantic relationship while she experiments with sexual partners in the new found freedom of the 1920s.
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| Private Lives
Written by Noel Coward Directed by Jonathan Kent Starring: Toby Stephens, Anna Chancellor, Anthony Calf, Anna-Louise Plowman With: Sue Kelvin Designed by Anthony Ward Lighting: Mark Henderson Sound: Paul Groothuis Music: Matthew Scott Running time: Two hours with one interval Box Office: 0844 482 5130 Booking to 21st September 2013 Reviewed by Lizzie Loveridge based on 8th July 2013 performance at the Gielgud Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, London W1D 6AR (Tube: Leicester Square/Piccadilly Circus) |
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